Whenever one writes about the potential trajectory of a war, they run the risk of being very wrong.  Once the forces are engaged, there is no telling what will happen.  This is perhaps the best practical reason wars should never begin.  In the wake of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and other US targets, several options were seemingly available to find and deal with the perpetrators.  At least a few of them did not involve mobilizing for war.  Unfortunately, it turned out that war was really the only option ever considered and Afghanistan was invaded within weeks.  Less than two years later, US forces were also embroiled in invading and occupying Iraq, a country whose government Washington had been conspiring to overthrow since it outlived its usefulness at the end of the 1980s war between Iran and Iraq.  The results of that war are still being tallied.  What is known is that over 5000 US forces died in that conflict, somewhere around one million Iraqis lost their lives, the nation’s infrastructure remains minimally functional in many parts of the nation, and parts of the countryside are still in a state of war, with Iraqi, US, and other forces fighting Daesh (IS) fighters for control of territory.

           Afghanistan, too, remains in a state of war.  Afghan resistance forces the US and Afghan government in Kabul call Taliban are retaking regions of the country from Kabul and US forces.  Like it has for the past fourteen years, the fighting ebbs and flows according to the seasons and other factors both natural and manmade.  Whether or not the resistance forces are truly Taliban is known only to those who are actually participating.  From what can be gathered from media sources, it appears that the resistance is a combination of Taliban, local residents protecting their areas, gangsters and drug traffickers protecting their merchandise, and nonaligned forces selling their services to the bidder with the most appealing offer.  Even the actual Taliban, however, are not necessarily the same Taliban who were thrown out of Kabul by the US invasion and have been fighting them ever since.  Indeed, this Taliban is a new generation of fighters who, according to some stories in the Western media, have developed a political savvy that refrains from enforcing certain religious strictures (forbidding the education of girls and the playing of music, for example) that alienated Afghans before.

           Then there are Libya, Syria and Yemen.  All three of these countries are not the countries they were before the US military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.  In the case of Syria and Yemen, these nations find themselves in the throes of civil wars that are notable for their bloodshed and flagrant disregard for civilian lives.  In Syria’s case, the conflict has been arguably prolonged by the influx of foreign fighters armed via the international arms market, wealthy donors who share their goals, and an unholy conspiracy of national governments from the Gulf sheikdoms to Turkey, Europe and the United States.  As for the Syrian government itself, even if only a part of what is reported in western media is true, its bloody disregard for the lives of those in “rebel-held” districts is well documented.  In Libya, the 2012 overthrow of the government led by Muammar Gaddafi created a hornet’s nest of fundamentalist armed warriors willing to go and fight wherever they are told they are needed.  In Yemen, a long running dispute between different ethnic and tribal groups in that nation is now a full blown civil war with one side getting military and financial support from the monarchy in Saudi Arabia.

           We are told that the primary enemy in Syria (and Iraq, for now) is something called the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL or ISIS) or Daesh.  For my purposes, I will use Daesh.  This organization claims to be Islamic and apparently has its most immediate roots in the debacle that followed the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States.  However, its history is longer than that.  If one were to create a kinship tree of Daesh, it would include virtually every jihadist organization of the past fifty years.  Of course, the religious philosophy of groups like Daesh is only a part of what makes such groups appealing to those who join and support it.  These groups also play on the economic situation of those it hopes to recruit, their anger at the discrimination they feel in western nations, and their desire for revenge against those who have destroyed their civilizations.  They are the result of decades of imperial intervention, military and otherwise.  The very wars and economic imperialism that we were told would bring democracy and peace to these lands are the very same phenomena that inspired the creation and proliferation of the groups Russia and the western nations are sending troops and bomber planes to.

           Given this, it is easy to conclude that if war worked Daesh would not exist.  Instead, there would be some kind of peace and capitalist democracy across the Arab and Muslim world.  Instead, obviously, there is an incredibly brutal and bloody war that could end up involving much of the world and being even bloodier than it already is.  But, say those on all sides--those motivated by humanitarian ideals and those motivated by less lofty motives like profit and power--now that the war is engaged what else can we do but join in?  Those with humanitarian motives want to stop the bloodshed and despair, while those with other motives want to get their piece of the spoils.  At least the latter are honest with themselves and the world.  Of course, when the former combine with the latter to convince those of us who want nothing to do with the war to join them, only the devil’s henchmen smile.

           In the past few weeks, the bedlam in the Middle East has lashed out in Europe and perhaps in the US in the form of terror attacks.  Alliances seem to shift ever so slightly, although the opposition of the west to Assad remains fairly strong while Moscow’s support for his regime is unwavering.  Daesh’s fortunes seem to shift and rumors fly about in the media regarding who supports them and who buys the oil the sell.  Turkey has unleashed its terror against the Kurds once again and shot down a Russian plane.  Washington continues to expend its armaments inventory by bombing Syrians and Iraqis, and Britain has finally joined in the expanding chaos.  Hecate laughs ever louder and the war industry’s cash registers resound with bloody joy.  Refugees of the disaster flee the scene only to find hate, police batons and camps stifling any expressions of welcome by the world’s citizens.  No one in the West with any power calls for sanctions against those who fund Daesh and other groups intent on their form of religious war; perhaps because those who would be sanctioned are the same as those who provide the West with oil, loans and other elements of the neoliberal regimes that rule us all.

           Alliances shifted plenty before World War One and World War Two.  Pope Francis has called this the third world war and criticized those who make war while celebrating peace.  I would argue, as so many of us did in decades past, that this third world war has been underway since the end of the second one.  Just ask the people of those nations that used to be called the third world.